


as above, so below

by 26stars



Series: AU August 2020 [20]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Bonding, Bus Kids - Freeform, Fluff, Gen, Implied one-sided attraction, Including Jemma almost dying, Missing Scene, Mistaken for a couple/pair, References to canon s1a events, Season 1 era, Sightseeing, Stargazing, road trip au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:47:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26105182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26stars/pseuds/26stars
Summary: Skye, Jemma, and Fitz take a weekend road trip out to the Grand Canyon the day after their team rescues Coulson from Centipede. Magnificence above and below and lots of bonding in the middle.Featuring Jemma introducing Skye and Fitz to Alya--the star, that is.
Relationships: (if you know how the story will end), Jemma Simmons & Skye | Daisy Johnson, Leo Fitz & Jemma Simmons & Skye | Daisy Johnson, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Series: AU August 2020 [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1860802
Comments: 14
Kudos: 33
Collections: AOS AU August 2020, Women of the MCU





	as above, so below

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Florchis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Florchis/gifts), [accio-the-force (XOLove47)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/XOLove47/gifts).



> So my long fic from two years back actually references this road trip, though in that fic I only wrote about the drive out and the Kids' return to the bus. I deliberately didn't reference any of the plot from that fic here, only where the trip falls in the timeline, so you can enjoy it without ever touching that fic. It was nice to come back into this time period with knowledge of how the series ends and get to sort of weave it all in here. They were just babies!
> 
> For Flor and Force--thanks for loving these three.

They hadn’t spent any time on Orbitz before heading out that morning, so their lodging that night is the first motel they come to with a lit Vacancy sign and the option of seeing a room in advance (Jemma wants to be sure of the water pressure before paying for a stay). Two adjoining rooms make sense, and the price is manageable, so they split the cost evenly three ways. The ensuing awkward moment however, comes when Skye asks, absolutely sincerely, if Jemma is going to stay in her room or Fitz’s.

The two fall silent for longer than Skye has ever heard them go without speaking. She herself stammers, trying to cover the awkwardness for a moment, and when she loudly announces that _of course, girls room/boys room makes the most sense,_ the two of them both agree immediately.

Once they are both behind their motel room doors, Jemma drops her bag on her bed and, turning to Skye says, firmly but quietly,

“Fitz and I aren’t sleeping together.”

Skye, still blushing slightly from the previous moment, feels the heat swiftly return to her face.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that…”

“I know everyone thinks we’re a unit,” Jemma continues, “and plenty of people talk about us like a packaged set, but we’re not an item. Never have been. I actually thought you knew that already.”

“I did,” Skye insists, feeling ashamed. “I know you well enough, if you guys were on the DL, I know you would have told me by now. I actually didn’t mean it like that, I just really thought…”

Jemma is unzipping her duffel bag, methodically laying out her clothes, her shower kit, her tablet charger… “Whatever Fitz’s feelings are for me, he’s not the kind who would want to share a room with a woman he wasn’t related to unless he was shagging her. So no, we may be platonic, but not that level of platonic.”

Skye nods, turning away to open her own bag. Jemma doesn’t seem angry, but Skye hates the thought of offending her.

“Sorry,” she repeats another time. “I didn’t mean to make things weird.”

“We just rescued our boss from a former dollhouse town,” Jemma reminds her calmly. “You found him in a machine that was reading his memories, and with a woman who claims to be speaking to a Clairvoyant. This is hardly the weirdest thing that’s happened in the past day.”

Skye turns around to smile hopefully at Jemma, the knot in her stomach loosening a little.

“Even less weird when we add it to the list of the past three-and-a-half months. Remember when you almost died back in October?”

“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Jemma groans, plugging in her tablet to charge. “Would you like the first shower?”

The first shower turns out to be the only shower, when the hot water runs out before Skye has even finished with hers.

“It’s all fine,” Jemma insists as they tuck in for the night. “I suppose we’ll be plenty hot and dusty by the time we get back tomorrow.

Skye had always marveled that doing something as sedentary as driving could tire her out so much, but maybe it’s the lingering exhaustion from the stressful, mostly sleepless few days behind them. Still, Jemma has set an alarm that wakes them at a decent hour, since none of them want to waste the limited time they have away from the Bus.

They’re staying nearest to the South Rim of the canyon, so Skye drives them that direction once they’re back in the car and taking turns applying a bottle of sunscreen. She has the aviator sunglasses she’d stolen the day before when she was pretending to be May, Jemma has a hat and a large pair of sunglasses, but Skye is most concerned for Fitz, who had neither a hat nor glasses on the Bus to pack for the trip. At least the two both have sneakers, which is more than Skye can say for herself. Her boots will have to do for the hike, however long the science duo end up lasting in the sun.

They had researched a little from the car the day before, and with the option of hopping on and off shuttle busses at various points as a safety net, they had decided to do the South Rim Trail and not dip down into the canyon itself—none of them were at all outdoorsy besides barely being dressed for the occasion, and no one wanted to get back on the Bus the next day with a sprained ankle.

Skye had heard of the Grand Canyon in passing growing up, at one point had learned how it got there, carved out of the land by a river that now seemed far too small to have ever done this kind of damage, but no pictures online could have prepared her for just how _huge_ the canyon was. As they approach the rim and its vastness finally becomes visible, Skye lets herself just stop and let out a low whistle.

“Wow.”

Beneath the overcast sky, the whole expanse seem to scream with majesty.

They take their time, walking along the mostly-flat trail for a couple of hours and taking plenty of pictures. Skye listens to Fitz and Jemma chatter about their knowledge of the canyon, the era of its creation, the landscape of North America a few million years ago…

She can’t help thinking as they’re talking though that anyone who doesn’t consider them as essential to one another as land and sea is just blind or very, very dense.

They sit down at one lookout point and eat their packed lunch, stop in at one of the trading posts for a little souvenir shopping, and then continue along the rim. High afternoon hits, and Skye finds that her concerns about the Brits melting in the sun were unfounded—the clouds barely break all day, and the temperature hovers soundly just above freezing. It’s the cold that eventually drives them back onto the shuttle and back towards their car in the lot, and they take a detour to a different town for dinner before heading back to their motel.

“I’m still hoping for the clouds to clear,” Jemma mentions as they pile back into the car after dinner. “Wouldn’t it really be something to see the stars, all the way out here in the desert, but also over such a gorgeous landscape?”

“If it were dark enough for the stars to be bright, it would be too dark to see the landscape,” Fitz reminds her from the backseat. 

“Maybe they still will, it’s not too late,” Skye offers. “Though I don’t think I can offer to stay up all night with you.”

Fitz has his tablet out as Jemma sighs. “Yes, I suppose.”

They’re all quiet for a few more miles, but then Fitz leans forward between Skye and Jemma, laying his tablet on the console.

“Weather patterns say the sky will be clear over here, on the eastern rim, between midnight and 2 a.m. tonight. We’ve already got a car…”

Skye almost immediately protests, but then she glances at Jemma and sees the hope on her face and can’t quite manage it.

“Let’s do it,” Skye immediately says instead.

They still head back to their motel to do another attempt at showers, pile on more layers, and steal the blankets and pillows from their beds. After stocking up on tea and coffee from the nearest gas station, Skye gets directions pulled up on the SHIELD-issue GPS that is installed in the console, and they hit the road again. Thankfully the car practically drives itself through the miles of dark, flat highways, even if the gas-station coffee is actually much stronger than she expected. Fitz is actually the one to drift off first, though Jemma seems far too excited to even consider doing the same.

“Is this on your bucket list or something?” Skye asks as she steers their car through the night. “Stars in the desert?”

“Well, my hometown had a fair bit of light pollution, and my father always told me that the stars were best the furthest you could get from the cities, but that’s nearly impossible to do in Britain, and there’s always the clouds to contend with…”

“Did you guys share the stargazing hobby?” Skye attempts, though she’s never been much of a natural when it comes to asking people about their parents.

“I had scoliosis as a girl, and after I had surgery to correct it, I had to stay lying down for a few weeks,” Jemma offered, not sounding at all ashamed. “Throughout those days, my father would wheel my cot outside after sundown and teach me about space. He was a lecturer at the university—that was his field—and I think he saw that as his one chance to really sell me on it, when I was incapable of running away or getting distracted by anything else.”

“Sounds like it worked,” Skye teases. “You still ended up in biochemistry though.”

“Yes well, it’s rather hard to convince yourself that stars will save more lives than the life sciences, but the good thing about stars is that they’re still there whenever you have time to come back to them.”

They wake Fitz up as they near their destination, and he directs them more specifically to an area of highway with a wide, flat shoulder where they can safely pull off. The night air is obnoxiously cold as Skye steps out on the gravel and checks the sky, her breath catching as she glances up.

_Oh. Now I get it._

They’d spent all day staring at the expanse below them that it had been easy to forget the one above. Now, it was filled to bursting with thousands—millions—of tiny lights, brighter than Skye had ever seen them, so beautiful she almost couldn’t speak.

“Wow.”

Jemma seemed skeptical when Skye suggested climbing up on the roof of the car, but she comes around quickly when Fitz reminds her that sitting on the ground means spiders and scorpions. Skye leads the way up, spreading a blanket over the luggage rack and directing Fitz to toss up the pillows and other blankets, then helping to pull the other two up with her. The three of them get comfortable, squeezing in between the bars of the luggage rack, her and Jemma bookending Fitz, who lies with his feet near their heads.

“I’m so glad we did this,” Jemma keeps saying as they spread the remaining two blankets over all three of their bodies. “Can you even…”

She trails off, but Skye understands.

“Yeah. Really.”

Just like the canyon, there’s really no describing it. There’s only experiencing it.

True to form, Jemma can’t quite stop herself from monologuing a little, pointing out constellations, sharing stories of the myths that gave them names, the nebulas that birthed them…

“What’s your favorite star?” Fitz asks after listening quietly for a long time, and Skye nearly laughs at the question, but of course, Jemma has an answer.

“Theta Serpentis,” she says immediately. “It’s actually two stars, though. They’re locked in orbit, about as far from one another as Pluto is from our sun. And they’re close—only about 155 light years from our solar system.”

“Where is it?” Skye asks, and Jemma pulls out her phone, opening an app that uses augmented reality to add the constellations to the sky.

“She’s the end of the snake’s tail,” Simmons explains, pointing on the phone.

“Oh, so it’s a she?” Skye teases, and Jemma explains.

“She has her own name—Alya. I think it’s just beautiful.”

They pass the phone down to Fitz so he can look too, and Skye smiles to herself as she remembers the time she thought of the two of them their own binary star system—bright and strong and burning and moving around each other flawlessly.

The phone comes back to their side and Jemma continues her guest lecture, detailing other constellations, more exceptional stars, and eventually Skye feels her eyes drifting closed.

“Jemma, I love you,” she finally says, “but if we’re going to sleep in beds tonight and not up here, we’ve gotta hit the road soon or I’ll fall asleep at the wheel on the way back.”

Thankfully, Jemma is understanding, and the three of them groggily climb down and back into the car. Fitz and Jemma are still in the middle of some kind of discussion that Skye is too tired to follow, so she doesn’t even notice until they’re back on the road that Jemma is now in the backseat, not the front. Skye downs the last of her coffee, turns on Safe Driver mode, and settles in for the haul, barely noticing when the car falls completely silent again.

When they pull into the hotel, Fitz and Simmons don’t seem to notice when she parks at their doors and kills the ignition. As she turns to wake them up though, Skye catches sight of them in the car’s interior lights for the first time. The pillows and blankets are piled in the middle of the bench seat, but Jemma is leaned over on top of it, sound asleep. Fitz is upright, but his hand is resting on Jemma’s shoulder, as though wanting to make sure she was safe, or at least still there. Skye smiles to herself, resists snapping a photo, and reached back to tap both of them awake in turn so they can shuffle back into their rooms with their bedding and mumbled goodnights.

 _And she says they don’t sleep together…_ Skye thinks just before she drifts off.

**Author's Note:**

> I lied--there's one reference to my long fic--Skye's description of FS as binary stars. I'd like the record to show I used that metaphor well before Alya was canon so now I just feel all <3 <3 <3
> 
> I don't think I've ever use the FS relationship tag on a work of mine...only took me 104 other chances to get here, lol.


End file.
